BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

MPD Textbooks: — Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) (a.k.a. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. —James G. Friesen, PhD. Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, (includes discussion of demonic possession) Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers,1997.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

“Wrong Norma” by Anne Carson (Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize):

A subtle paragraph from the book. (1, p. 63):


“Christopher Hitchens once told me that having a child is like your own heart walking around in another body. So there went my own heart walking toward its own death, every millennium, every hour closer. I could not bear this. I decided to make a deal with the laws of physics, or maybe it was the laws of metaphysics, I get those two confused, anyway we all agreed that if Herakles were to set himself on fire and burn to death, his finite human nature could be purged away in the flames and leave the infinite part, the part like me. I thought this a clever solution. Unfortunately, I overlooked the essence of death as an event: it happens in time. For a mortal creature death is instantaneous - you’re alive one minute, dead the next. But for a creature who exists (like myself), outside time, death has no instant. I have no instant.  I am at all times. I have to watch my most beloved child burn to death at all times. And I always will.


Comment: The speaker sees herself as outside time, which would be true  only if she were the human author’s alternate personality.


1. Anne Carson. Wrong Norma. New York, New Directions Books, 2024. 

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